We just finished a major initiative on cost of product failure. It was successful, and looks to have reduced costs by several million dollars. We were all invited to a lunch to celebrate our success.
The lunch was pot luck. No one that I know of went.

If they said "beer and pizza" then technically they supplied 3 more beers and 2 more pizzas than advertised.

I think they might have tried to get away with that excuse at the time! There was enough grumbling that whenever they did this in the future, they made sure that there was always more than enough, though, so perhaps it had a good effect in the longer term.

We just finished a major initiative on cost of product failure. It was successful, and looks to have reduced costs by several million dollars. We were all invited to a lunch to celebrate our success.
The lunch was pot luck. No one that I know of went.

That's ridiculous. Cheapskates.

Potlucks only work in the workplace if everyone planning to attend comes up with the idea and everyone agrees.

It was successful, and looks to have reduced costs by several million dollars. We were all invited to a lunch to celebrate our success.
The lunch was pot luck. No one that I know of went.

That sounds like things my company would do to "raise morale", which only served to reduce morale. Several years ago, at a different company, morale was pretty bad due to multiple rounds of layoffs. To improve morale, the company started having mandatory ice cream time on Wednesdays. Yes, we HAD to go have ice cream. A manager decided that since we were all there every week, it was the great idea to have layoffs on Wednesdays and to start announcing at the ice cream party who had been laid off. Everyone got something: some of us got ice cream, others got pink slips! Morale did not improve, surprisingly.

At one former employer management called everyone into a meeting, told them that there would be layoffs and that they would meet with each of us individually re: our status. Then they sent us back to our desks to sit and wait to be called into a manager's office and hear the verdict.

They did that at one of my workplaces, too, except the other way round - the phone calls to the manager's office came first, and then (once everybody who was being made redundant had had their call) the rest of us were called into a room to be told we still had jobs. Of course, it was fairly clear what was going on from the start to those of us with our ears to the ground, so it was pretty tense. On my floor, the only two people to get phone calls were sitting on either side of me at the time...

The company that made me redundant last year did it all properly with a "consulting period" and supposedly hadn't made up their minds exactly who would be made redundant at the start of the period. Instead they were doing it by job title, and the employees had to elect representatives to be a part of the negotiations on terms for those who would be kept. (There's a standard legal process for it in the UK for companies over a certain size). So they had a spreadsheet with, for example, "Junior web developers: Before, 5. After, 2" but the exact junior web developers to be made redundant were meant to be determined by a scoring system of some kind.

I was voted to be one of the employee representatives, but since I was the only technical author at the company* at the time, they had to tell me that my name was on the list before we started the process, because otherwise I'd have found out by seeing "Technical authors: Before, 1. After, 0" in the spreadsheet!

* (eta) Or at least, that bit of the company. One irony is that we'd been taken over and they had another five or so technical writers in the USA and Canada, who I'd just started to get to know and work with at the time. There were plans to standardise the docs across all the sites and products, and so on. But since the powers that be (at that time) wanted to ditch the product our site worked on, I never got to do that. Then they ended up keeping the product anyway because the equivalent that they had, and that they'd thought could replace ours, turned out to have massive security holes and to be unfit for purpose. Ours had its issues but did at least work...!

When my last employer had layoffs, they called a number of us into a room and told us all that we were no longer employed. I'm pretty sure most of the other people in the room knew what was going on before the announcement because the group in the meeting was every single contract employee at that branch of the company and there wasn't anything else in common between us.

As angry was I was (am?) about some of the details around my job being eliminated, I am very grateful for the way my employer handles layoffs. They're basically paying me to jobhunt between now and 12/30. Technically I won't be on "unassigned" status until 11/1, but they let me know at the beginning of October, and my boss reassigned my work then. She's also allowing me to WFH whenever I want. I go into the office a couple times a week for a few hours, mostly to network/show my face, but I find it pretty uncomfortable to be there, especially if I sit with my (former) team. And yesterday my boss was kind of pressuring me to apply for a position that I don't want to apply for (I've been warned off that area by a former co-worker who is desperately trying to get out). I imagine it's partly concern for my welfare and partly the fact that if/when I get a job internally, her budget is off the hook for my salary.

My company formalized the reorganization a couple of weeks ago and a number of people still don't know if they have new jobs. A lot of people have left rather than wait to find out they've been laid off.

Ha, one time my workplace organised a site meeting which was advertised as having "beer and pizza", and they ordered about three pizzas, and the beer was the four cans or so left in the fridge from a previous event. By the time most people even got to the room at the given start time, it had all gone. (I did manage to get one of the beers, hooray...!)

I don't care if you didn't see a specific daily fee in your group's contract. It's in there and you're not getting out of paying it because "you didn't know". And seriously, on your salary* $1.00 a day for 3 days is not going to break you financially.

Whether Morning's scooter was blocking the aisle, or the other shopper's cart was blocking the aisle, or the store's display was narrowing the aisle so that anyone with either cart or scooter couldn't help blocking the aisle: in any case, the proper thing to say if you're having trouble getting by is 'excuse me', or words to that effect.

The proper thing to say in such circumstances never includes the words 'fat and lazy.' Or, for that matter, either of those words separately.

And making negative assumptions as to why somebody's sitting down instead of standing is not ever a good idea.

(it occurs to me that I'd better specify that I don't think Seaboe was blaming Morning. Rant above was not aimed at Seaboe.)

I appreciate your well-spoken feelings on the matter, thorny locust. And I agree with Seaboe Muffinchucker that crowded and blocked aisles are annoying for all shoppers. And this aisle didn't just have me on my scooter cart, but two shoppers with children, a teenager on the phone and a display of snacks on separate shelving. I apologized when I asked the teen to let me by, but I guess "excuse me, but may I go by you? " isn't polite enough.

I was just trying to get to the diet ginger ale. On sale for $1.28 a two liter.